


they'll hang us in the louvre

by loveleee



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: ...ish, Canon Compliant, F/M, Morning Sex, post-season 2 finale, serious conversations about silly things, such as high schoolers being put in charge of a gang
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-20
Updated: 2018-05-20
Packaged: 2019-05-09 10:03:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14713988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveleee/pseuds/loveleee
Summary: It’s not until later – alone in her bedroom, curled up in the window seat with her diary open in her lap – that she realizes she never really answered his question.And how could she, when she isn’t even sure what it is he’s asking?(Set post-finale, Betty and Jughead talk.)





	they'll hang us in the louvre

**Author's Note:**

> Small tweak from canon: their stay at the Five Seasons happened on a Friday night - not mid-week.

Betty wakes up first.

The night before, they’d opened up the curtains to let the dim glow of sunset wash over the room, and then forgotten to close them. Now she blinks against the sunlight, and shifts onto her back, her foot brushing against Jughead’s calf as she moves.

_Jughead._ He’s still asleep beside her, his face soft and slack and sweet in a way she’s not sure she’s ever seen during the waking hours. She’s woken up with him before, just a handful of times, but never quite like this, warm and naked and tangled together. She feels so cozy, so _good_ , and she lies there for a minute or two, torn between letting him sleep as long as he wants, and waking him up to share the moment with her before it’s gone.

Something in him must sense that she’s awake, though, because he stirs, mouth stretching open into a yawn. He lifts his gaze to her face, his eyes heavy-lidded with some heady mix of languor and lust. A lazy glimmer of want curls through her, surprising her, settling low in her stomach.

“Hey,” he says, his voice cracking on the single word.

“Good morning.” Betty finds his fingers beneath the bedsheet, slips them through her own. “Sleep okay?”

“Slept _great_.” Jughead pulls her arm over his waist, leaning in to kiss her. She smiles, sighing into his mouth.

When they break the kiss she rolls onto her side to see the time on the alarm clock: just past eight in the morning. It’s a Saturday; her mother is driving Polly and the babies back upstate today, and check-out isn’t until eleven. “It’s early,” she says. “We could sleep some more.”

He presses up behind her, spooning her, his arm snaking around her waist to pull her against him. “Mmm,” is all he says, pressing his face against the back of her neck.

“Jug,” she whispers, and then his hand moves up, cupping her breast. Her body responds immediately, a heated flush in her chest, a sudden throb between her legs. He teases her nipple with his fingers, and a soft whine forms in the back of her throat.

_Or we could do this._

Jughead grazes his lips against her shoulder blade, making a pleased sound when she pushes her hips back against him. His hand slides down, over the plane of her stomach and past her navel, coming to a stop between her thighs. His fingers move easily against her, and she closes her eyes. “ _Oh._ ”

“Let’s try it like this,” he murmurs, brushing her hair back from her neck with his other hand.

A shuddery thrill thrums through her, rippling out from the place where his thumb presses against her most sensitive spot. It’s been three months, give or take, since they started sleeping together; it’s all still so _new_ , and exciting, and a little intimidating, if she’s being honest. She can’t explain why but she loves it when he says those three little words to her, low in her ear: _let’s try this_.

“Okay,” she agrees, letting him tilt her hips forward as he positions himself behind her. It takes a few tries, and then he’s inside of her, his breath coming out in a hot rush against the side of her throat.

It doesn’t feel as good as when she’s on her hands and knees. Or when she has _him_ between her knees. But she relaxes into it, letting her shoulders fall back against him. There’s just something about having him behind her that makes her feel –

“Fuck,” he mutters, his hand falling still against her as he thrusts into her lightly. His fingers dig into her thigh.

“Feel good?”

“Yeah,” he grunts. He pulls at her leg, moving it up and back over his own, and pushes in deeper. Betty gasps at the change in angle – it’s awkward, with her leg bent like this, but also better. “You like it?”

“Ah – yeah,” she says, craning her head back towards him. “It’s good.” His mouth brushes against the corner of her lips, pressing a sloppy, heated kiss there.

He finds a rhythm, a slow, steady one, and as he rocks into her his fingers start to move again. Betty moans as the pleasure builds, her nails scraping against the dark green sheets, fingers twisting into the soft pillow beneath her head.

It only takes a few minutes for her to come undone, and he tips over the edge after her, burying his face into her hair as he comes.  They lay together in sated, sleepy silence for a minute or so, and just as she’s about to drift off into sleep again Jughead pulls away, rolling onto his back, tugging her onto his chest. The space between her thighs feels wet, and she knows she’ll need to leave this bed soon, but for now all she wants is to feel his skin against hers.

“First time we’ve had morning sex.” Beneath her cheek, she can feel the words rumble through his chest. He sounds satisfied – almost smug. Betty brushes her fingers over his ribcage, and he twitches beneath the touch.

She smiles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

They stay in bed for another hour or two, and then shower, hands skimming over slick skin beneath the falling water. Jughead cracks a joke about leaving before they have to pay for another night, and they step out into the morning sunlight with damp hair and an overnight bag slung over the crook of his arm.

(She never asks how he’d managed to afford the room – the champagne, the candles – in the first place. But she thinks she knows, when a text from Veronica pops up on her phone, asking how her night went with a winking face emoji as punctuation.)

It’s not until later – alone in her bedroom, curled up in the window seat with her diary open in her lap – that she realizes she never really answered his question.

And how could she, when she isn’t even sure what it is he’s asking?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Veronica comes over an hour or two before dinnertime, a pair of black-rimmed glasses perched on her nose. Betty’s noticed them appearing more and more lately – Veronica wears them whenever she’s about to engage in some Serious Thought – and she wonders how she’d known they’d be needed for this conversation.

They sit on opposite sides of the sofa, feet sharing the middle cushion. Veronica’s eyes take on a fond, dreamy warmth as Betty recounts her evening.

(She leaves out some parts: like the fact that it took Jughead fifteen minutes to pop open the bottle of champagne that was already chilling in an ice bucket when they’d arrived, only for the both of them to decide they didn’t like the taste, anyway.

How he’d kissed her so thoroughly after that that it left her breathless. How he’d undressed her slowly, running his hands over her hips, her thighs. The way he’d bent her over the side of the bed, his mouth hot against the base of her neck, her legs trembling beneath her, toes skimming the carpet.

The catch in his voice when he’d said, _I love you, I love you so_ much _, Betty,_ like he still can't believe it's true.)

“He said I didn’t have to answer right away,” Betty says, resting her cheek against the back of the sofa.

“And what’d you say?”

Betty shrugs. “I didn’t say anything. We…you know.” She bites her lip, a bashful smile, and Veronica presses her hand to her heart.

“You are precious, Betty Cooper.”

Betty rolls her eyes, but can’t stop the blush that floods her cheeks.

“So what’s the problem?” Veronica asks. “Don’t you want to be his Queen B?”

“I’m not sure that’s really what he was asking,” she says softly.

Veronica looks puzzled, and _of course she does_ , Betty thinks; Veronica loves Archie, a boy who means exactly what he says, and says exactly what he means. She doesn’t understand what it is to love someone like Jughead, who has spent a lifetime living behind walls – behind bricks piled a mile-high, of sarcasm and hedging and half-truths – who still lets their dust cloud his words long after she’s knocked them down.

A moment passes, and Veronica pushes her glasses up onto the crown of her head. “I’m going to give you some really lame, clichéd advice,” she says, leaning forward. “Do what feels right. Think about what _you want_ , and do that.”

It is kind of lame, Betty thinks. It is somewhat clichéd.

But maybe it’s a cliché for a reason.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The text from her mother comes through just as Betty is flipping a veggie burger in a pan on the stovetop. _Hit traffic on the way up. I’m spending the night here with Polly and the twins. Don’t stay up too late – love you._

She texts her back – _ok, love you too, say hi to Polly for me_ – and then texts Jughead. He’s at her door in less than thirty minutes, helmet in hand, beanie tucked into the back pocket of his jeans.

She stands up on her tiptoes to kiss him. “Hi.”

“Hi,” he replies, his eyes scanning the room as though searching for signs of something amiss.

It’s the first time he’s been to her house since it all happened, and she understands the instinct: there had to be _something_ in here that hinted at the sickness that had slowly eaten away at Hal Cooper. For days she had nearly driven herself crazy looking for it – the final clue that would unlock the puzzle of what her father had done – rifling through cabinets, peering underneath the Persian rug, shaking open books in the hopes that something incriminating would fall from between their pages.

There was nothing. But she gets it, why Jughead would still want to look.

Betty takes his hand in hers, swinging them gently between them. “Did you have dinner?”

He looks back at her, lips curling into a small smile as if by reflex. “Yes. But I wouldn’t say no to _dessert_ ,” he teases, and his hand finds her waist, tugging her into him, fingers pinching playfully at her hips.

She giggles – it’s cheesy, but the moments when he is like this, light and just so openly _happy_ , are some of the moments when she loves him the most. She twists out of his grasp. “Later,” she says. “Are you staying over?”

“If you’ll have me.”

“Pfft.”

Jughead full-on grins now, and steps past her to place his helmet on the little table beneath the mirror in the hallway. “Do you wanna watch a movie, or something?”

Betty shakes her head, suddenly feeling nervous in a way that she hasn’t felt with him for ages. “Maybe, but…first I thought we could talk,” she says, “about what you said to me last night.”

His smile fades into something much more uncertain. “Oh.”

“No, it’s not bad,” she says, grabbing his hand again, one and then the other, clasping them together. “I just – I wanted to talk it through. Together.”

They sit on the sofa, face to face, much closer than she and Veronica had sat, knees bumping together.

“This…thing that your dad did, with the Serpents,” she begins, tucking her hair behind one ear, scratching at a spot on her neck. Her hands feel jittery, anxious, like they need something to do while she speaks. “It’s a big deal.”

A slight frown creases his forehead. “Yeah. I mean – it is, and it isn’t. It’s kind of symbolic. But it’s not – it’s hard to explain.” He sighs, and gathers her hands in his own, resting them together on his knee. “I didn’t really mean it literally, what I asked you. It’s not, like, a time commitment. You don’t have to _do_ anything.”

“No, I know,” she says. “But for _you_ , it’s a big commitment.”

Jughead nods. “Yes.”

“Did he ever ask you if you wanted that kind of responsibility?” she asks gently. “It just – it seems like a lot, for one person. And we’re still in high school.”

“Well, no, but…” Jughead presses his lips together, thinking. “Look. I was the _only one_ who tried to stop the brawl with the Ghoulies, and look how that ended.”

_With you half-dead in a hospital bed,_ she thinks. _With the worst night of my life._

“The Serpents, they…they need someone looking out for them, or they’ll just…” He runs one hand over his face. “They need me, Betts.”

She squeezes his other hand between both of her own. “I get that. I do. But…for how long?” she presses. “For a few years? For life?”

His frown deepens. “Well…yeah. You’re a Serpent for life, it’s…kind of the point.”

It’s the answer that deep down, she knew she would get. The one that even deeper down, scares her the most. A memory flutters through her mind: sitting across from him in a booth at Pop’s, their hands entwined much like this; _I wish we could just go_ , and how badly she’d wanted it, too.

How badly she _still_ wants it.

“So…” She searches his eyes, but suddenly they’re guarded, opaque. “So what does that _mean_ , Jug?”

He looks away, and shrugs, detangling his hands from her grip. “I guess it means what it sounds like.”

Betty feels her heart constrict, sinking like a stone into the bottom of her stomach. “So everything you used to say about wanting to leave Riverdale. Getting away, going to college – has that all changed?”

Jughead doesn’t answer. He looks down at his hands, settled loose in his lap. _Two weeks ago_ , she thinks, _you almost died._ His body, bloody and limp in his father’s arms. It sends her pulse racing painfully each time she remembers, straining with useless, post facto adrenaline.

“What about _your_ dreams, Jug?” she asks him softly. “Is this really what you want?”

When he still says nothing, she adds, “What do you want? And you can’t say me.” Her mouth tilts into a half-smile, but he doesn’t match it.

“College is…” He shrugs. “Betty, you know that’s never been a real option for me.”

“That’s not true,” she insists. “You’re _smart_ , Juggie. There are scholarships, and I’ll have my Blossom money by then –”

“I could never ask you for that,” he interrupts, finally meeting her gaze again.

She stares back. This isn’t quite the conversation she meant to have right now, though they’ll have to, at some point, some day off in the distance. _Depending on how this one goes_ , she thinks.

“But you’re asking me for the future,” Betty says, a quiver in her voice. “And I want to promise you that, more than anything, but not here. Not Riverdale.” She swallows down the sudden lump in her throat. “I want to go to college. I want to try living in a city, and…and travel, and go to Paris and Rome. I want to walk down the street and see something _new_ for once.

“And…if I have kids, I don’t want to raise them here. I don’t want them to graduate high school in the auditorium where their grandfather murdered my friend.”

Before the words have finished leaving her mouth, he’s gripped her hand again, squeezing tight. Betty blinks in surprise, and a few of the tears she’s been holding back finally escape, dripping down her cheek.

“I want to do _so many_ things, Jug,” she tells him quietly. “I know that I want to do them with _you_. But that doesn’t mean they have to be here. There’s so much more for us. I know there is.”

There’s a long silence, and then Jughead brushes away a lone tear from his own cheek, staring down at where his other hand is curled around Betty’s. “You deserve everything, Betty,” he says. “If I’m holding you back from that –”

“But – Jughead, look at me,” she pleads. “You deserve it too. You _deserve_ everything you want.”

He huffs out a half-laugh. “It’s not really that simple for me.”

“I know it’s not simple,” she admits. “But I love you too much to let you think you don’t have any options.”

That, she thinks, is what she wants for him, more than anything else: a choice.

Jughead nods slowly. “Okay.”

She squeezes his hand again, drawing his eyes back to hers, and lifts an eyebrow in question. “Okay?”

“I get it. I understand.” He sighs. “You’re not wrong, Betty, I just…if, or when, the time comes, I don’t know if I can just walk away.”

And maybe he’s right. Maybe when the time comes, they’ll be right back on this sofa, having this exact conversation, and not even a single millimeter closer to finding an answer. But she can’t afford to think that way – to let fate take over, and lead them both down paths they didn’t ask for. “Then we’ll figure it out. Together.”

Jughead closes his eyes and rests his head on the back of the sofa, but he leaves his hand where it is, linked with hers. “This feels really unresolved,” he murmurs.

She smiles a little, though he can’t see her. “It does.”

That, she thinks, is kind of the point.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Later, in her bed, after a movie and ice cream and some slow, gentle sex (she’s still a little sore from the night _and_ the morning before), she traces patterns over his bare back as Jughead lays on his belly, head resting on his forearms.

“Hey,” he says, and she hums in response, looping her finger past a cluster of freckles below his shoulder. “D’you…do you actually want to join the Serpents?”

Betty pauses. It’s not that she hasn’t thought about it – it’s that she has, and it’s complicated. When she’d done the dance, it hadn’t been with the intent to join them; and yet it had still stung when they’d continued to treat her like an outsider all those weeks and months later. There was an appeal to it, beyond the mere fact of Jughead’s presence: to know that no matter what, someone would always have your back, and there would always be a place you belonged.

But a part of her thinks she already has that: in Jughead, in Kevin, in Archie, in Veronica. In the office of the Blue and Gold, typing away at her latest story; in the gym at River Vixens’ practice, clapping her hands and kicking the air; in a booth at Pop’s, curled up beside her boyfriend, watching her friends sip milkshakes and talk about their days.

“You don’t have to,” he continues. “I think you know this, but – it’s not really what I was asking.”

And she does know, that he wasn’t really asking her to be his queen. He was asking her to be _his_. And that, at least, is the one thing she’s never doubted.

“I don’t know yet,” she says, resuming her movements over his back. He shudders a little when she runs her fingers along the side of his ribcage, the place where he’s most ticklish.

“Okay,” he says, closing his eyes. “Either way…it doesn’t change things for me.”

_I’ll never stop loving you_ , she hears, an echo in the back of her mind.

“I know.” Betty leans down, and presses a kiss to the curve of his shoulder, just above the spot where a clean white bandage still circles his upper arm. “Me neither.”

**Author's Note:**

> Even ignoring the fact that the concept of a "Serpent King" is...stupid...the thing that upsets me about that plot development is that it feels like it's locking Jughead into a future he didn't really ask for. Leading a gang isn't really something you do for a couple of years until you peace out and leave town. (Unless you're FP, I guess?) Anyway - I wanted to explore that here, and thought it would be interesting to address from Betty's POV, as someone whose options have never been as limited as Jughead's, and can (hopefully) help him see past the path being laid out for him.
> 
> Other things...  
> \- Veronica definitely paid for that hotel room, right? (Or Cheryl.)  
> \- All of my s2 one-shots must now be named after Lorde songs. fact.  
> \- Please leave a comment, I would really really love to know what you think! <3


End file.
